Curricular integration
Why should you integrate study abroad into your curriculum?
There are several reasons why working your trip into a course or program can help you and your students.
- Study abroad will help your students achieve your course objectives. For example, if one of the objectives in your course is to communicate in the target language with ease, then providing students with the opportunity to interact with native speakers during study abroad can help them achieve that goal.
- Integrating study abroad into the curriculum allows you to establish contact with partners in the host country and to maintain a relationship with them as your trip evolves. Some of the student participants in our study indicated that interacting with locals provided them with valuable learning experiences (Fischer & Viens, in press).
- By integrating the study abroad trip into your course, you have a chance to obtain student buy-in. Students are motivated to participate in the trip when they can set objectives with you, plan and delegate trip planning tasks, and work together to prepare for their upcoming adventure (Fischer & Viens, in press). Students want to go on trips. This trip might be one of the reasons why your students enrolled in the program in the first place!